This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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The 1650s are back. Against the backdrop of our new Carolean age, a flurry of books has appeared to illuminate our nation’s brief flirtation with republican government. Paul Lay, quondam literary editor of The Critic, led the way with Providence Lost; Clare Jackson’s Devil-Land won the Wolfson Prize two years ago; Henry Reece’s The Fall documents the last days of the English republic and the second volume of Ronald Hutton’s monumental biography of Oliver Cromwell has just been released to much fanfare. 

To their number we may add Alice Hunt’s Republic, a year-by-year narrative of “a daring and unprecedented decade that deserves to be written about and understood as a distinct entity”. Cromwell is at its centre. 

I was quite old when I learned that Oliver Cromwell counted as a “controversial” figure. I probably belong to the last cohort of children reared on uncomplicated Cromwell-worship. This has something to do with the fact that I attended a Jewish primary school: Cromwell is still held in high esteem amongst Britain’s Jews, as the man who undid Edward I’s Edict of Expulsion and let us back in. The Irish are less keen on him, but Hunt exculpates him somewhat on the Drogheda question. 

As a boy I unquestioningly accepted the verdict of the now-infamous Ladybird book, that Cromwell was “a good man, deeply religious and neither greedy nor — except in Ireland — cruel”; “a good father to his children and the friend of all honest men”. 

Reading that judgement now, I am reminded of a funny line about Charles I in an essay of Macaulay’s, where he defends Cromwell and his regicide peers on the grounds that the old king had it coming: “A good father! A good husband! Ample apologies indeed for fifteen years of persecution, tyranny and falsehood.”

Was Cromwell basically akin to the man he had beheaded? Was he a king in all but name? Was he a tyrant who brushed parliament aside when it got in his way — a fundamentally bad man, for whom all that can be said in mitigation is that he was nice to his children? 

This would adhere to one of those ironic patterns we like to find in history: Rome, so proud of expelling the Tarquins, eventually relapsing to autocracy; Napoleon emerging from the French Revolution to crown himself emperor. “Revolution”, of course, means the turning of a wheel. Did the English Revolution go full circle, replacing one overmighty king with another? 

Some contemporaries liked to think so. Lorenzo Paulacci, a Venetian diplomat, said that the Instrument of Government, which installed Cromwell as Lord Protector, “practically makes him king”. Royalists mocked Cromwell for his regal cosplay: 

What’s a Protector, ’tis a stately thing

That Apes it in the non-age of a King

A Tragique Actor, Cesar in the Clowne

Hee is a brasse farthing stamped with a Crowne

A fops proud Asse masked in a Lions skin

An outside Saint with a white devil within. 

Hunt begs to differ. She is an expert on royal ritual and ceremonial, and the finest parts of her book are concerned with the performance of power. Power, after all, was as public in the 1650s as it had been under the House of Stuart: “The things that have been done,” said Thomas Harrison in 1660, “have been done upon the stage, in the sight of the Sun.” 

The kings may have been booted out, but much of their glitz and glamour was kept in. When Cromwell became Lord Protector, Hunt tells us, London’s Inns of Court spent more on their celebratory bonfire than they had done for the coronation of Charles I. 

Yet the republic, Hunt insists, was not a monarchy in disguise. Cromwell had to co-opt the symbols of royalty but this was “royalty with a difference”. There was no muttering about divine right: his authority was always “circumscribed by a written constitution”. He was “not a king in all but name,” Hunt writes. “There was regality … but there was novelty too.” 

Republic is a book about novelty. Whilst the focus is principally on the political actors, Hunt also tells us about the other novelties which this tumultuous decade brought forth. We get an intimate portrait of Thomas Hobbes: “six feet tall with a twinkle in his eye and a penchant for singing the songs of Henry Lawes at bedtime”. Lesser-known innovators also feature: Ralph Austen, the enthusiastic tree-planter; Samuel Hartlib, a Polish émigré tinkerer, who “epitomises” England’s “revolutionary spirit”. We find the Experimental Philosophy Club convening in John Wilkins’ rooms at Wadham College: a “Knot of … Ingenious & free Philosophers”, who were “addicted”, as Robert Boyle said to John Evelyn, to “experimentall learning”. One lasting novelty of the 1650s was English opera, which offered the public wholesome escapism amidst all the upheaval. Evelyn went along to a performance in May 1659, the month of Richard Cromwell’s abdication. “In a time of such a publique Consternation,” he wrote, “such a Vanity should be kept up or permitted.” 

British history, Hunt laments, has often “chosen to forget the ingenuity and inventiveness of its republican moment”, and her book sets out to redress this. Ignoring the fact that every historian thinks his or her chosen period is “vibrant” or “dynamic”, we must ask: has British history really chosen to forget this? 

The historiographical wheel turns back towards once-popular whiggish interpretations

Austen and Hartlib may not be familiar names, but few forget the ingenuity of Hobbes — and no-one forgets the ingenuity of Milton. Cromwell himself was the hero of many a Victorian schoolboy. And Christopher Hill — one of the few twentieth-century Marxists whom people still read — made the inventiveness of this period the master theme of his career, finding it lodged amongst the common preachers and rabblerousers, who might previously have been dismissed as loons. 

There are several other examples of Hunt pushing with unnecessary force at historiographical open doors. The Puritans supposedly weren’t really so Puritan: they “had a vision of a godly, sin-free England”, but weren’t “averse to personal profit”. Far from deconstructing myths, is this not already the classic stereotype of the Puritan, at least since Weber? Hunt likewise goes out to bat for poor Richard Cromwell, so often made out to be a wet flannel; but nothing in her narrative serves to dispel his unfortunate reputation. 

Yet Republic may be “revolutionary” in the other sense of that term. The historiographical wheel turns back towards once-popular whiggish interpretations (doing some favours for Oliver Cromwell’s reputation). This is not a criticism, for the whiggish line has much to recommend it. Her closing argument is that the tumults of the 17th century explain Britain’s subsequent remarkable historical continuity. 

Something had to happen to show the monarchs that they exist “only as long as the people, and parliament, want them to”; and the knowledge conferred upon them by the regicide, and then the Glorious Revolution, has been the key to their survival, and to political stability, ever since. Cromwell’s crowned successors may therefore owe just as much to his example as Cromwell owed to Charles I’s — and perhaps more.